How much of that budget 'success' was down to what they inherited? God only knows what they'd have done had they inherited a total mess like the ConDems did. Meanwhile they opened up the immigration floodgates and changed this country massively and permanently, they signed us up to more EU interference, they embarked on a massive PFI fest, sold off our gold reserves, raided our pensions etc. etc. Given the economy they inherited, their term in office, the amounts they spent and the parliamentary majority they enjoyed and all their rhetoric about caring for ordinary people, anyone would have thought that stuff like education, the NHS etc would have been sorted in those 13 years. Instead we got Mid Staffs. hospitals, endemic abuse in the 'care' system, banking sector failure, discredited exams results and an NHS in hock to PFI. Great!
Given the opportunity they had, what good they did pales into insignificance when compared to the chaos they left behind and consistently refused to accept responsibility for until they were after our votes once again.
This is what Brown was telling those wonderful bankers he was so in awe of back in 2004:
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Let me thank you first for the scale of the contribution you make to the British economy - the £50 billion of income, 4 per cent of national output, and the 1 million jobs that arise. And let me thank you also for the resilience, the innovative flair and the courage to change with which you have responded to not just the world economic downturn but to the greatest economic challenge of our times - the challenge of global competition.
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http://webarchive.nationalarchives.g...ress_56_04.htm
And this is what he admitted in 2011, only after he'd been booted out of office and knowing his political career was over:
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Gordon Brown has admitted he made a big mistake while setting up the FSA because he did not appreciate the entangled relationships of financial services institutions.
In a keynote speech to the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire on Saturday, Brown said the FSA was set up on the assumption problems would come from individual institutions.
He said: “We set up the FSA believing the problem would come from an individual institution. That was a big mistake. We did not understand just how entangled things were.
“We did not understand how risk was spread across the system, we did not understand the entanglements of different institutions and we did not understand, even though we talked about it, just how global things were.
“So we created a monitoring system which looked at individual institutions. That was the big mistake.”
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http://www.moneymarketing.co.uk/gord...029361.article
Of course he doesn't say too much about why they ignored the warnings coming from insiders prior to the crash but then he might not be able to dismiss that as just a mistake...
Then there were the internal warnings about out of control spending which was ignored:
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A confidential document presented to the Cabinet in January 2006 asks: "We've spent all this money, but what have we got for it?"
It warns that the efficiency of the public sector needed to improve rapidly and insisted that "spending growth will slow". The document drafted by civil servants also says that "ineffective spending" must be "closed down".
However, Gordon Brown discarded the advice and embarked on a £90 billion increase in spending when he became prime minister.
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Quote:
Another leaked memorandum warns Mr Brown and Mr Balls that plans to scrap the 10p tax rate would hit millions of poorer Britons and pensioners - but the change was still introduced.
Mr Brown later denied that there would be any losers from the tax changes – before being forced to announce an emergency compensation plan.
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